A World Elsewhere
Page 22
Deacon saw a drop of sweat run down Landish’s face and into his beard. “Mr. James,” Landish said. “Do you mind my asking if you’re working on a new book?”
“A book of mine which I’ve called The Turn of the Screw was recently published. There are characters in it who resemble Godwin and this boy of yours.”
“Henry, you’re wicked,” Mrs. Wharton said.
He prodded his gouty foot with the cane. “I didn’t burn a word of it. The New York Times said of it, and I quote: ‘It is a deliberate, powerful and horribly successful study of the magic of evil. The manner is always graceful and scrupulously polite.’ ”
Edith Wharton was holding Deacon’s hand. “What you need is a wife, Henry,” she said. “You have too much free time. None of us can keep up with you.”
James threw back his head and laughed loudly, waving his hand at her as if to ward her off. “I am not merely a confirmed bachelor, Mr. Druken. I am a professed celibate. A virgin, in fact.”
“What’s a virgin?” Goddie’s high voice piped up. She jumped about on her chair to face her mother.
“A paradox,” Landish said. “Someone who on the one hand has never had any and on the other keeps it all to himself.”
“How vulgar,” Gertrude said.
James ignored her. “But one can know women without having known a woman. I am a virgin who writes frequently about women.”
Landish said, “My apologies. I merely spoke in a spirit of repartee.”
“Indeed you did,” said Edith Wharton, patting Deacon’s back as if the witticism had been his.
“Mrs. Wharton is working on what I am sure will be a wonderful book called The House of Mirth,” Van interposed.
“I grew up in a house in which there was a dearth of mirth,” Landish said.
“As there is in Lily Bart’s home too,” she replied. “I hope you will read my book. I’m not sure when it will be finished and published, but when it is I will send you a copy. And sign it for you.”
“Thank you.” Landish’s voice quavered, so grateful was he for her kindness.
“Mr. Druken,” James said, “has inspired me to write a book called The House of Girth.”
Edith Wharton exclaimed, “I declare a ceasefire.”
“Van,” James said. “I have to tell you this house is an absurdity. It is like some immense, gorgeous practical joke. What in God’s name are your family and it doing out here in this irretrievable, niggery wilderness?”
It was impossible for anyone in the room to ignore the look of devastation on Van’s face as Gertrude laughed.
“That is a question that I have often asked my husband.”
“The whole place is based on a fundamental ignorance of comfort. And such gaudy desolation, Van. Really, what is the point? Edith has a wonderful estate, one she also designed herself and caused to be built. The Mount. I’ve stayed there many times. I very much prefer it to here.”
“Don’t be concerned, Van,” Edith Wharton spoke up quickly. “That’s just the gout talking. Please, don’t look so distressed. Deacon, my friend’s leg pains him a great deal, which is why he must keep it on that little stool—it’s called a gout stool.”
“Do you plan to marry, Mr. Druken?” James said.
“I don’t—no, I suppose not.”
“Just as well. You would be twice encumbered with a wife.”
“Deacon is not an encumbrance.”
“Don’t you have any other advice for Landish, Henry?” Van asked. “Writing advice?”
“I would be grateful,” Landish said.
James sighed and adjusted his foot, wrapped in its many socks, on the chair, grimacing slightly. “All right then. Even assuming that you do have talent, you must travel. You must meet people unlike yourself. You must learn other languages if you wish to be a master of your own. Am I to take it that you only speak whatever language it is that you’re attempting now?”
“Henry!” Edith Wharton exclaimed, as Gertrude laughed.
“Well, Edith, you said yourself that you can never say you’ve read the Russians or the French if you’ve only read them in translation. Which means I have not yet read the Russians, I suppose. The best advice I can give any writer is have the good sense to be born rich.”
“I declined my inheritance,” Landish said.
“Why on earth did you do that?”
“Certain conditions were attached to it. My father wanted me to succeed him.”
“As what?”
“As him. He wanted to leave me his life so that I could go on living it after he was dead.”
“What was your father?”
“He was a ship’s captain. A sealing skipper. The men who served under him harvested one million seals. They caused to be built his reputation as the greatest sealer who ever lived.”
“Well. His memoirs might have been interesting.”
“Yes, they might have been. Though I’m sure that he would have stipulated that they not be published until after his death, owing to his eccentric disinclination to be hanged.”
“An estimable brute, I’m sure.”
“Worth writing about,” Landish said.
“Yet you have turned your back on the very people you knew best. No wonder you burn what you write. What would young Joseph Conrad write about if he had never gone to sea? Ship’s captains. First mates. Sealers. Fishermen. Have you been any of those things?”
“A sealer, I suppose, but only briefly.”
“So then.”
“I write about things I am. A writer. A boy. A man. A son. A friend. A student. A boy’s guardian. And about where I come from. Newfoundland.”
“You write about no one but yourself.” James eased his foot on the stool, grimacing with pain. “The only way for everyone to be equal is for everyone to fail. Therefore some must fail. There is no point in gracelessly blaming others for your fate.”
“You’re being cruel, Henry.” Mrs. Wharton frowned at him.
“When it comes to books, there is not the great divide between the classes that you seem to imagine. My father’s sealers would while away the time between eighteen-hour watches reading your books. As they went over the gunnels in a snowstorm, all the talk was of Roderick Hudson and what might become of him among the upper classes of Europe.”
James pointed at Deacon, who was sitting rigidly in his chair. “One can’t help thinking what this child, in other circumstances, might accomplish.”
Landish stood. “In other circumstances,” he said, “Deacon would not be Deacon. He blames no one, gracelessly or otherwise, for what he is. Nor do I.” He crouched, and took Deacon in his arms. Deacon burrowed his face into the crook of Landish’s arm.
Deacon woke in his bed to the sound of Landish’s voice in the Smoker.
“Mr. Henry Virgin James thinks I should have been a sealer.”
“You didn’t cause a scene, did you, Landish?” Gough said.
“I merely told him I preferred the works of Jesse James.”
“You didn’t.”
“No. I would have. But I didn’t think of it until now.”
“What happened, Landish?”
“I can just hear Van. ‘You must meet my daughter’s amusing tutor, Landish, who believes himself to be a writer.’ The Wilhelm Meister of Vanderland. And his thrice-named encumbrance. The celebrated celibate spoke of my encumbrances. The things I would have to rid myself of if I wanted to become a writer. My many encumbrances. He has none, you see. None of the encumbrances of life. Overgrown, erudite brat. He and Van. Little Lords Fondled Not. The Portrait of a Laddy. Yet to woo. Never will. Pronounced me unsuitable. Ineligible. Henry will go away and live to write another day. Whereas I, I am not a writer, Gough. I should write or admit that I can’t. I am holding Deacon back by pretending. Mr. James pointedly wondered what Deacon might accomplish in other circumstances.”
“I’m sure he meant if he’d been higher born.”
“No. More like if I’d been never born.”
“You think me self-indulgent.”
“If you’re not, the word should be stricken from the dictionary.”
Servants wheeled Deacon and Goddie about in wheelchairs, side by side. Goddie said she bet it was more fun than a bicycle. Together, they saw parts of Vanderland she had never seen before, the Ramble, the orchards, the vineyards.
Deacon joined her on Sundays when someone from the stables took her for drives throughout the estate in a carriage. He knew that he was pale by comparison with the soil-tilling blacks and the Southern-born whites. As always, Deacon tried to hide from Goddie his astonishment at the sight of the blacks, not telling her that, before taking the train south from New York, he had never seen a black person in his life. The gardeners stopped their work to watch the two children bowling along in the open carriage, stared at his frail paleness, and, in low tones lest someone hear and report them to Mr. or Mrs. Vanderluyden, called him Goddie’s Ghost. Goddie would laugh. She would exhort him to join her in waving at them. She would call out to the ones whose names she knew. “Hi, Billy. Hi, Mary.” They might simply have been playing different parts in a game devised as much for their sake as for hers.
They sat before the fire in the Rume, Landish smoking a cigar that Van had pressed upon him.
“It was something, wasn’t?” Van said. “Henry James. He’s been my friend for years.”
“And is he still your friend?” Landish said. Van ignored him.
“There are times when I cannot believe that I caused such a place as Vanderland to be built,” Van said.
“I am looking forward to the day when I will be born rich,” Landish said.
“Mrs. Wharton was right. It was the gout talking. But enough about the other evening. How are you managing your confinement to Vanderland?”
“It’s better than confinement to an attic.”
“But there are things you can’t do here. No worthwhile things but—you are a man who chases after certain kinds of women.”
“And you are one who overestimates their desire to escape.”
“Yet you can never bring yourself to say you are his father. I have never heard you say it. You might aspire less and write more if you lived alone. If you were free to travel.”
“I am free to travel. It’s travelling that isn’t free.”
“Perhaps you ought to have been the sealing captain your father wanted you to be. It is a wise man who knows his place.”
“And an unwise one who presumes to tell me mine. I’ve had enough for one night, Van.”
“Running away again?”
“You are right not to have made the beast with two backs even once, not even to see what it was like,” Landish said. “It’s a scary, hairy, howling, bellowing beast, Van. Much better to make the beast with one back, four fingers and a thumb.”
“What a crass and vulgar fellow you can be I have known since we met, but there was never such bitterness before in that wit of yours.”
“There is nothing new in my striking out when provoked. And I am as well able as ever to tell when someone is provoking me. As for my wit, it is the same as the one you so often passed off as your own.”
“Virginity has placed no limits on Henry’s genius. Quite the contrary, he believes. Mrs. Wharton’s father was George Frederic Jones. Are you familiar with the expression ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ Landish? It refers to the family of Mrs. Wharton’s father. Her mother was Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander.”
“My mother was Gennie Druken, Newfoundlander,” Landish said.
“I think highly of Deacon. He is not the beggar boy I imagined when you first wrote to me about him.”
“Why did you invite me to the Rume tonight?”
“I no longer equivocate,” Van said. “I see, exactly and instantly, what must be done. I issue orders in my accustomed manner, and others, in the manner of men accustomed to following orders, carry them out.”
“You were not so sure of yourself at Princeton. Or when you were spending time with Henry James.”
Van looked into the fire, his expression like that of someone brooding over a grievance that could never be repaid. He threw his brandy glass into the fireplace where it smashed into pieces.
“What are you trying to convince me of?” Landish said.
“I want you to know that I am someone who does things, not merely someone who causes them to be done. I am not the self-loathing fellow I once was. One day, perhaps, I will be able to put my last ghost to rest.”
“Your last ghost?”
“Something you can help me with. I’ll have more to say about it soon.”
Though Deacon told himself there was no such thing as a chimney witch, he thought of her making her way from chimney to chimney through catacombs that connected all the chimneys at Vanderland. He went to sleep face down but woke up on his back and heard a sound like the swishing of a dress across the floor. The scream that would chase the chimney witch away before someone wide awake could see her grew louder in his mind, but the hand of something held his breath long past the point where he could bear it until finally his voice came bursting from the dream and he threw himself from bed as if to dodge a slab of stone that had fallen from the ceiling. Gough was again the first to reach him.
So that he could be with Esse, Landish began to accompany the junior members of Van’s engineering team—the ones who lived at Vanderland and maintained the inner workings of the house—and the governesses on their Sunday afternoon summer hikes through the Ramble. The governesses held parasols to shield them from the fierce Carolina sun. The sight of them picking their way through the Ramble as if they had never been outdoors until today made him feel absurdly out of place, unaccountably there among people who would not have thought him much more foreign had he been Chinese.
He wished that he could take her hand in his and speak as he would have if they were walking through the Ramble by themselves.
The other men walked with their hands clasped behind their backs, Landish with his arms swinging at his sides. Landish and Esse did their best to be last in line during their walks through the Ramble so that they could talk at least somewhat openly to one another. They became known as the stragglers, the slowpokes. The others would stop to let them catch up. The young engineers teased Landish for walking so slowly, telling him he had no land legs.
Sometimes Landish would lag just behind Esse. He touched the small of her back. It was damp with sweat. She pushed his hand away and coughed in protest. Sweat trickled from the hair at her temples and down the back of her neck. He traced the wet furrow of her neck with his index finger. She made as if to shoo away a fly and coughed again. She looked back for an instant. She mouthed “Stop,” tried to look cross with him but smiled. Her face was flushed.
“There are three hundred rooms in this house,” he whispered. “There must be one where we’d be safe.”
“There isn’t a room in the world where I’d trust myself with you,” she said.
In bits and pieces, in stolen moments, he told her everything about himself except Captain Druken’s hat. He didn’t want to admit to her that he had stolen it, broken into someone’s house at night like a common thief.
He slipped a note into one of her books: My Dearest Esse, I am in love with you. Someday, when the circumstances are right for all of us, will you marry me? She wrote back: I too am in love with you. I won’t burn your note. I’ll hide it. You do the same with mine. I now possess the heart, and the collected unburned works, of Landish Druken.
When the circumstances are right. He couldn’t imagine them ever being right, yet felt certain that, somehow, they would be. A governess could not marry. They—all three of them—would have to leave Vanderland, a prospect that would not have daunted him if he’d been able to imagine any “situation” he could find that would allow him to properly support Deacon and Es
se.
She had never seen an ocean nor any body of water so large you couldn’t see the other side. “They should have called me Landish,” she said. “When I was a child in Virginia my friends pronounced my name, Siobhan, ‘Shove on.’ I shoved on as far as Vanderland in Carolina. More than eight years ago I came to Vanderland and I haven’t left the grounds since. Here I can read constantly—I doubt you could name a place that I don’t know more about than you do, yet I have been nowhere. A train ride from Virginia to Carolina. The greatest adventure of my life so far. Little Deacon has travelled more than I have. I know the story of the world by heart. I teach it to others. But I’m not in it yet.”
Landish lived in a near-constant state of elation. The mere sight of her rendered ludicrous the notion that the universe was in any way, anywhere, deficient.
He decided that, for now at least, Deacon mustn’t know. This secret would be harder for him to keep than that of Captain Druken’s hat. Deacon might give it away in the Academy just by looking back and forth between Landish and Esse, smiling, as he always did at the sight of the happiness of others. And there was the chance that he would be upset by the intrusion of Esse into their lives, her intrusion into Landish’s affections.
“If you’re not happy with your situation, then you should find another one,” Goddie remarked primly to Landish in the Academy as they were about to start, in late summer, one of the extra lessons that Gertrude had reluctantly admitted Goddie needed. Deacon had been more or less conscripted to join her.
He turned in surprise. “Who told you that I’m not happy with my situation?”
“Sedgewick told me in our Geography lesson. He said you do nothing but complain. He said you go into Ashton and get drunk with fairy ladies and then come back and make fun of the Vanderluydens if not for whom you would starve to death.”
“Sedgewick said that?”
“He said you think you’re as good as Father and you should be rich like him.”
Deacon glared at her from his seat at the table next to hers. “Landish didn’t say that.”
“He said you drank so much last night you might still be drunk.”